Legalize It

Nearly one-fifth of Americans live in a state where smoking weed is legal. Voters in 8 states, and the District of Columbia have in recent years voted to legalize recreational use of marijuana.

US Attorney General Jefferson Sessions has attempted to throw a thick blanket over the burgeoning marijuana industry and the expansion of these citizens’ right to smoke pot. Sessions has rescinded an Obama-era rule in the Department of Justice that reprioritizes marijuana cases to the bottom of the list – don’t bother with weed at the federal level.

But this was a tepid response by President Obama.

This is what happens when our elected leaders fail. Obama should have worked to have marijuana removed from the list of scheduled drugs like heroin. Keeping marijuana on the scheduled drug list keeps the attorney general’s Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Agency in the business of busting pot smokers and dealers.

Marijuana is far less harmful than alcohol. Research is showing that where marijuana is legalized, the use of alcohol and prescription drugs has gone down. Early reports are showing a reduction in crime in communities with legal weed. Even setting aside the tax revenue, providing a safe, regulated legal product on the market, with the opportunity to educate people about marijuana is worth it.

I urge Congress take up this issue of marijuana prohibition.

Congress must take action to remove the federal government’s ability to pursue marijuana criminal cases.

Congress must act by putting the power to regulate marijuana where it belongs, at the state level.

I like to tell my congressional representatives what I think about issues. I call. I email. I ping them on social media. I’m represented by Democrats, so I’m generally just letting them know I support their support on a given issue.

I like to use too many GIFs on Twitter. I often post the same one multiple times because it makes laugh every time. This is just a dumping ground where I keep GIFs that I enjoy using on a regular basis, so I don’t have to keep searching for them every time.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know who Michael Goodwin is. He writes a column for the New York Post and is a Fox News contributor. His latest column has made Donald Trump very happy.

A quick Google search shows that Goodwin is a typical rightwing hack who says stupid shit on Fox News and makes a living doing that, or something like that. I really never understood that there could be a marketplace for people like this to opine. In a November 2015 column, Goodwin said that President Obama didn’t want to fight ISIS and he should resign.

That’s the context to place Goodwin’s latest column, in which he writes that despite Trump’s “missteps, there has never been a day when I wished Hillary Clinton were president. Not one.”

Goodwin spent the first three paragraphs bitching about Steve Bannon. Then Goodwin fires a few spitballs at Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury,” which has Trump clearly livid.

Around the tenth paragraph in Goodwin gets to his point. These are the parts that has gotten Trump so excited this evening.

Indeed, as Trump’s accomplishments accumulate, the mere thought of Clinton in the White House, doubling down on Barack Obama’s failed policies, washes away any doubts that America made the right choice.

So excited Trump just hurled out a couple of tweets that didn’t really match up with Goodwin’s column.

The word “consensual” doesn’t exist in Goodwin’s current column, perhaps Trump got confused, or Goodwin changed his column. Those tweets were deleted and Trump tweeted this.

Trump is happy. He found someone to say nice things about him in the newspaper, even if it is the New York Post.

Remember Bill Stepien? He was Chris Christie’s campaign manager. Then he hooked up with Bridget Kelly and was caught up in the George Washington bridge scandal. Now he apparently works for Donald Trump.

According to Rachel Maddow’s show on Friday, Stepien was spending the weekend with Trump at Camp David.

Apparently Stepien is Trump’s deputy assistant to the president and director of political affairs. While Stepien and many top Trump cabinet were invited to Camp David, notably absent is Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“It’s carnage,” said Donald Trump in a recent interview about Chicago. Trump often claims that Chicago is more violent than Afghanistan. It’s an odd comparison and Chicago’s murder rate is actually not that high.

Chicago ranks 25 of 30 cities with the highest murder rate

Now look at Baltimore, Maryland

In 2015, Baltimore was ranked number two for murder rate with 344 murders that year.

There were 478 murders in Chicago. Chicago is a city of 2.7 million people. With population of just over 600,000 people, Baltimore had just 134 fewer murders than Chicago. That means Baltimore had more than 55 murders per one hundred thousand residents. Chicago’s murder rate per one hundred thousand was slightly more than 17.5 in 2015.

St. Louis had the highest murder rate in 2015

The Republican party has largely one policy when it comes to the economy – tax cuts.

Here’s how the tax cuts work

1. Cut taxes for the wealthiest citizens promising that the tax cuts will pay for themselves because of a boost the economy will get because rich people pay less taxes.

2. Eventually the economy boost never materializes. What happened instead is there’s a huge gaping hole in our budget. To fix that, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will need drastic cuts.

3. Repeat step 1.

Since 1980, this has been the Republican strategy. It’s a great plan, because all you have to do is convince people that taxes suck and they should be lower. Most people agree with the idea of paying less taxes. They may not agree with it if it means their parents won’t be able to retire and live independently. With the cuts to Social Security and Medicare, they’re going to have to live in your basement.

But hey, those rich bastards needed that money more than you did.

Sometimes they call it trickle down economics. The “theory” is if we cut taxes on the wealthiest among us, they will be so happy that they’ll hire us to do a bunch of shit. It never works. All that happens is that the rich get richer and the rest of us get poorer.

The above photo is of Grover Norquist. Norquist is the founder and president of tax advocacy group – Americans for Tax Reform. Norquist’s goal is to lower taxes to strangle the federal government of its revenue until it dies.

In 2001, in an NPR interview, Norquist said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

I will be the first to say, for most people, don’t judge them too heavily on what they did when they were teenagers, or even in college. For many people, those are formative years and people mature and change much between the ages of 17 and 37.

But for Roy Moore, I think his formative years tell you all you need to know about who Roy Moore is as a person on a fundamental level.

In 1969, at the height of the Vietnam war, Moore graduated from the US Military Academy at Web Point. After graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree, he served several posts as a military police officer. Moore served at Fort Benning, and Germany, and he did a tour in Vietnam. He was the commander of the 188th Military Police Company of the 504th Military Police Battalion.

It sounds like his fellow soldiers hated his guts. They called him “Captain America,” but didn’t mean it as a compliment. Moore was a hard ass. In his own autobiography, he recalls sleeping on sandbags because he was worried one of his fellow soldiers would put a grenade or a bomb under his bed. Several men had threatened to kill him.

Moore was discharged from the military as an Army captain in 1974 and admitted to the University of Alabama School of Law. No one liked him there either. Professors and fellow students thought he was stupid. They said he lacked the capacity for keen analysis. In 1977 Moore got his Juris Doctor degree and returned to Gadsden where he became an ambulance chaser. He ran a private law practice doing personal injury and insurance cases.

That Moore ever became a judge is shocking. It actually says a lot Alabama, and it’s not good. But that Moore preyed on 14-year-old girls, that’s not shocking. The guy is an asshole. Most people in Gadsden, I’m guessing here, but they don’t like Roy Moore.

That’s why when people saw him creeping around teenage girls, they were like, “That’s that asshole lawyer that no one likes.” They didn’t do anything about him, but they tried to keep him away from young girls. That’s why he got banned from the town shopping mall.

Moore apparently first met his wife, Kayla Kisor at a dance recital when she was a teenager. Here’s the creepy timeline on that. Moore says that when he met Kisor she was 16 and he was a 30-year-old adult man. And remember, he met Kisor at her high school dance recital.

Why was a 30-year-old man going to high school dance recitals? But the even creepier part is what Moore recalls thinking when he met this teenage girl.

“I knew Kayla was going to be a special person in my life,” Moore wrote in his autobiography.

Moore and Kisor didn’t apparently meet again until she was 23 – at a Christmas party. She was going through a divorce and had a kid. The two married the following year.

It’s not that strange that a 38-year-old man would marry a 24-year-old divorcee. But that Moore first met her when she was 16 and was creepy about it, that’s the weird part.

Now add his admitted life story to the recent allegations that Moore showed a keen interest in “dating” teenage girls. He was going to high school dance recitals, and he was looking for romance. That’s strange, even for 1985.

On December 2, 1859, abolitionist John Brown was hanged for leading the failed raid on Harpers Ferry.

Brown’s plan was to raid the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. He would use the weapons stolen to arm slaves so that they may revolt and free themselves.

The raid didn’t go well, Brown and his men were either killed or captured. Brown was tried and convicted of treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the murder of five men, and inciting a slave insurrection.

It’s righteous to take the right position when it’s not popular with the capitalists.